Haskins Publications

Number	855
Year	1993
Drawer	16
Entry Date	07/20/1998
Authors	Best, Catherine T.
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Publication	Developmental Neurocognition: Speech and Face Processing in the First Year of Life, edited by B. de Boysson-Bardies et al.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0855.pdf
Abstract	Adults have difficulty discriminating many non-native speech contrasts, yet young infants discriminate both native and non-native contrasts. Language-specific constraints appear by 10-12 months. Evidence presented here suggests that mature listeners’ discrimination is constrained by perceived similarities between non-native sounds and native categories, and that this native language influence may not be fully developed at 10-12 months. The findings suggest that young infants have broadly-tuned perception of phonetic details. Next, they begin to discern equivalence classes that roughly correspond to native phonemes. Perception of phonological contrasts, however, depends on recognition of their linguistic function, and thus develops later. But what sort of information in speech forms the basis for perception of equivalence classes or phonemic contrasts? I argue that distal articulatory gestures, rather than proximal auditory-acoustic cues or abstract features, are the primitives both for adults’ perceptual assimilations of non-native phones and for infants’ emerging recognition of native categories.
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